Evaluating engineering learning and gender neutrality for the product design of a modular robotic kit

Ansh Verma, Purdue University

Abstract

The development of a system is informed from design factors in order to success- fully support the intended usability from the perceived affordances. The theory of ‘Human Centered Design’ champions that these factors be derived from the user itself. It is based on exploiting these affordances that the boundary of technology is pushed to sometimes invent new methods or sometimes approach a problem from newer perspectives. This thesis is an example where we inform our design rationales from children in order to develop a gender neutral modular robotic toy kit. To this end we create HandiMate, a robotics kit which enables users to construct and animate their toys using everyday craft materials. The kit contains eight joint modules, a tablet interface and a glove controller. Unlike popular kits, HandiMate does not rely on manufactured parts to construct the toy. Rather this open ended platform engages users to pursue interest driven activities using everyday objects, such as cardboard, construction paper, and spoons. These crafted parts are then fastened together using Velcro to the joint modules and animated using the glove as the controller. To understand the usability of the affordances, we discuss the results from user studies. These studies were designed to understand the a affinity of HandiMate among children. The first study reveals that children rated the HandiMate kit as gender- neutral, appealing equally to both female and male students. The second study discusses the benefits of engaging children in engineering design with HandiMate, which has been observed to bring out children’s tacit physics-based engineering knowledge and facilitate learning. We further investigate the use of a gesture user interface by children for controlling robots made from a modular robotic toy kit. We conducted gesture elicitation studies to suggest embodied hand gestures for invoking motion among user developed robots. We elicit gestures from 23 children, first by portraying the ‘effect’(motion from the toy) and then asking the user to perform it’s ‘cause’ (reading gestures by a wearable glove). A total of 276 gestures for controlling 4 referent toys were collected, analyzed and reported. The gesture data, calculated by a kinematic hand model, was analyzed using a visual analytics approach integrating an interactive clustering and visualization technique. Our findings suggest designs preferences of generic gestures for controlling toys like puppet, robotic arm etc. The results also imply that the sustained period of a gesture pose is about 30 seconds and give us insights into higher level classification of gestures mapped to the motion, topology and logical action based on motion of the toy. We also found that children would prefer using whole body interactions for big robots as compared to using hand gestures for lap-sized robots. We further discuss these design implications which helps designers design gesture systems for modular robotic kits.

Degree

M.S.M.E.

Advisors

Ramani, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Design|Mechanical engineering|Computer science

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